The co-hosts interview Barack Obama, July 29, 2010
When your flagship talk show spends more time reading legal disclaimers than delivering punchlines, the problem isn’t bias—it’s boredom.
It is a curious measure of our times that the supposed “collapse” of the liberal media matrix is marked not by the fall of governments or the exposure of great scandals, but by the whispered suggestion that The View—that shrill Manhattan brunch of a television show—might be “reviewing its bias.”
Once upon a time, the Western press aspired to Fleet Street’s irreverence or Edward R. Murrow’s gravitas: adversarial, fact-driven, and at least vaguely tethered to reality. Today, its model is the midday panel show, in which a handful of lavishly lit talking heads misremember Soviet history, misquote the Constitution, and misapply the word “fascism” before the first ad break.
Rosie O’Donnell now tells us the problem isn’t bias but “obedience” to Trumpism—a “soft fascism in full lashes.” Fascism in lashes! Mussolini, somewhere in the afterlife, is wishing he’d thought to work Sephora into the corporate-state complex.
“When entertainment becomes sermonizing, and the sermonizing stops being fun, the pews empty.”
Let’s be clear: The View’s bias isn’t a flaw; it’s the product. It exists as a corporate-subsidized safe space where the Obama-Clinton catechism can be recited without fear of contradiction. Russia stole the election. Trump is a Kremlin agent. Fauci is The Science™. The CIA are the last line of defense against tyranny—so long as they’re not investigating Democrats.
The real reason the “liberal media matrix” is dying is not because Trumpists stormed the control room, but because it has bored itself to death. The View was never meant for debate; it was a daily catechism, a secular psalm service for the already converted. When entertainment becomes sermonizing, and the sermonizing stops being fun, the pews empty.
And when the end comes, it won’t be a noble farewell to the audience, but something closer to the last episode of a Soviet variety hour—the same tired faces, mouthing the same tired lines to a half-empty studio and with even emptier conviction. The tragedy isn’t that The View might disappear, but that its vapid chatter was ever regarded as the pinnacle of the American cultural conversation. If that’s the summit, no wonder we’re coasting downhill.
Not that they make it easy to coast. Host Sunny Hostin, in one particularly baroque flight of rhetoric, managed to liken January 6th to both slavery and the Holocaust. Yes, really. In a sane world, you’d expect a producer to step in and ask her to pick one historical catastrophe and stick with it.
But perhaps that’s unfair. The View is also a master class in the art of the on-air legal disclaimer. Recently, the coven was obliged to walk back a series of smears against Trump allies and George Santos. Joy Behar “forgot” to mention that Santos had pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft, prompting ABC legal to hand her a note mid-broadcast. The correction was read with all the sincerity of a hostage video.
It didn’t stop there. Hostin herself had to recite disclaimers about Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, after omitting the rather crucial facts that neither man was charged with any crime and that Hegseth had denied wrongdoing in a civil matter. A few minutes later, a fourth legal note corrected the implication that Trump had bribed Pam Bondi—again, both parties deny it.
By that point, the legal team might as well have sat on the couch and read the whole show themselves.
Still, Hostin’s talent for casual incitement remains undimmed. In a recent episode, she mused that it might be understandable to attack ICE agents—because, during raids, they wear masks. “If you mask yourself because you don’t want to be seen,” she intoned, “there will be a reckoning.” In other words: If you enforce the law while dressed like you’re enforcing the law, you’re fair game.
This is what passes for the conscience of the Republic in 2025—a panel of millionaires playing revolutionary cosplay between hair and makeup. They imagine themselves as Edward R. Murrow with manicures, but they function more like the ladies’ auxiliary of the DNC, armed with cue cards and legal notes.
The decline of The View isn’t an isolated media story; it’s part of a broader cultural decay. Across the West, the institutions that once held public trust—the press, the academy, even the arts—have become echo chambers for a narrow elite, more interested in enforcing orthodoxy than in uncovering truth. That’s why viewership isn’t just down; it’s disengaged. The audience no longer believes the performance.
If The View finally winks out, it will be because it has outlived the emotional need it once served. When politics becomes pure tribal theater, people will watch only so long as the show feels entertaining. Once it becomes homework, even the faithful stop showing up.
Like so many collapsing empires, it won’t be defeated in open battle but will simply fade into irrelevance—remembered, if at all, as a long-running talk show where news went to die, history went to be rewritten, and Sunny Hostin compared January 6th to the Holocaust without anyone in the control room batting an eye.
And perhaps that’s the most fitting epitaph: not that The View was biased, but that it was boring. And in the end, for all their fury at Trump, Tucker, or whoever the villain of the week happened to be, boredom was the one opponent they couldn’t outshout.